Japanese comfort cooking
Nikujaga is warm, home cooking
Hola! Did you like getting to know my R&D team a bit? I’ll remind you here that if you ever have kitchen questions—we like to answer guest questions every once in a while on Fridays for annual subscribers (and of course, subscribers get access to all of these recipes and even a 15% discount on the Shop Little Spain site!).
So today’s recipe is from Koji Terano from the R&D team, who grew up in Osaka, Japan. He’s a fish expert—before he came to work with us, he was a sushi chef at Sushi Ko in Chevy Chase, Maryland, one of the best sushi restaurants in the DC area. Last year you might remember him breaking down a massive Atlantic tuna, and he’s the one who was working on a cured tuna belly in the style of jamón…which you can actually try at The Bazaar in New York!
Today, as we’ve been sharing childhood recipes from the team, I wanted to give Koji the opportunity to share with you the beef stew that his mother made from him growing up. It’s called Nikujaga, literally “meat-potatoes”—and that’s what it is. It’s a delicious, simple dish of meat, potatoes, carrots, and green beans, flavored with some soy sauce and sugar. It’s true home cooking—it will make you feel like your grandma made it, even if your grandma never visited Osaka!
Koji was happy with the version he made, he said it tasted like it did when he was a kid. It’s a dish they ate regularly, because it’s so easy and quick to make—using the microwave, you can cut down on the cooking time for the vegetables significantly with a nice tip for hybrid cooking.
So friends, make the nikujaga and send me a note at longertables@joseandres.com or leave a comment below so Koji can know how it went!
Nikujaga